Demand-Side Management (DSM) relates to techniques that can be used by suppliers (typically of commodities) to influence demand patterns so as to gain an advantage (usually by controlling the frequency and/or amplitude of fluctuations). DSM is of particular interest to energy suppliers, which have long been using price incentives (the most common DSM technique) to “transfer” some of the flexible load to off-peak periods (“day-rate” v “night-rate”) but may also be applicable in relation to other types of resources, including physical resources such as water, fuel, etc., and computing resources such as bandwidth, computing power, etc.
DSM is typically based on regular patterns (i.e. known recurrent fluctuations) and as such is not suitable for being used to control unexpected bursts in real-time. The primary reason for this is that although it is possible to communicate real-time price information to customers, there is as yet no user-friendly, efficient (automated or programmable) way for consumers to respond to that information. For this same reason, existing DSM techniques are ill-equipped to deal with situations in which micro-management, taking into account local specificities (e.g. micro-generation, local storage, use of community resources etc.) is desirable.
Prior art techniques for DSM generally do not permit real-time fluctuations to be taken into account in determining the demand, and to the extent that they attempt to take account of past usage data and/or predictions about future usage, they generally require information about variations in demand to be collated, reviewed and acted upon centrally, by a power generation or supply company, for example. Local factors such as micro-generation are therefore not easily taken account of in the pricing mechanism if at all.